The Best American Poetry 2012 (38 page)

D
ANIEL
T
OBIN
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1958. He is the author of six books of poems:
Where the World Is Made
(Middlebury College Press, 1999),
Double Life
(Louisiana State University Press, 2004),
The Narrows
(Four Way Books, 2005),
Second Things
(Four Way Books, 2008),
Belated Heavens
(Four Way Books, 2010), and
The Net
(forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014). He is also the author of the critical studies
Awake in America: On Irish American Poetry
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and
Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
(University Press of Kentucky, 1999). He is the editor of
The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2007),
Light in Hand, Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge
(Quale Press, 2007), and
Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art
(University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Pimone Triplett). He is currently Interim Dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College.

Of “The Turnpike,” Tobin writes: “One of the first poets whose work I fell in love with was John Donne. For all of his immense imaginative ingenuity and formal mastery there is something shamelessly
intense about the poems—they are demanding intellectually and emotionally, physically and metaphysically, and immoderately so. Line after line of a Donne poem coveys the feeling that he is intent on outrunning the proverbial ‘dissociation of sensibility' Eliot saw settling into Western culture after him, pedal to the metal across hairpin turns of rhythm, syntax, and conceit.

“Donne's ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,' which ‘The Turnpike' purposely echoes, rides on its own extended metaphor, though more as a pending salutation than as a valediction. Among other things the poem updates Donne's physical metaphysics with its own metaphysical physics. Call it transportation as superposition, a doubling and redoubling of reality into parallel possibilities, though the poem refuses to drive wholly away from the palpable. Where does it arrive? Not at Donne's twin compasses come round again, but at a spark of perpetual motion, and below that the universal engine's catalytic stillness, inexhaustible: call it love's pure fuel.”

N
ATASHA
T
RETHEWEY
was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She is the author of
Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
(University of Georgia Press, 2010) and three collections of poetry,
Domestic Work
(Graywolf Press, 2000),
Bellocq's Ophelia
(Graywolf Press, 2002), and
Native Guard
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
Native Guard
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. At Emory University she is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. Her new book,
Thrall,
is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.

Trethewey writes: “The poem, ‘Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851,' is primarily about language, and it arises from a consideration of the darker legacy of Enlightenment thinking—the taxonomy and codification of ideas of race and difference (and white supremacy). The anatomist's lecture in the poem echoes my own sense of having been not only an object of curiosity (
What are you?
the constant question posed by strangers) but also a person subjected to being parsed in the American lexicon, by the nomenclature of miscegenation.”

S
USAN
W
HEELER
was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1955. She grew up mostly in Minnesota and has lived in or near New York since 1985. She is on the faculty of Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her
poetry collections include
Bag ‘o' Diamonds
(University of Georgia Press, 1993),
Smokes
(Four Way Books, 1998),
Source Codes
(Salt Publishing, 2001),
Ledger
(University of Iowa Press, 2005),
Assorted Poems
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and
Meme
(University of Iowa Press, 2012). She is also the author of a novel,
Record Palace
(Graywolf Press, 2005).

Of “The Split,” Wheeler writes: “Each major loss resonates, like overtones on a string, with deaths a person has known.”

F
RANZ
W
RIGHT
notes that he “was born in Vienna in the spring of 1953. My father had a Fulbright, and he and my mother—newlywed high-school sweethearts from Martins Ferry, Ohio—couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, a fact I find staggering. I suppose people born in the late twenties and thirties of the twentieth century became full-blown adults by the time they reached puberty, in keeping with historical events.

“I live in Waltham, Massachusetts—my wife and I have lived here for the past eleven or twelve years—and cannot say I have an occupation, although I led the graduate poetry workshop at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, spring 2004, and served as poet-in-residence at Brandeis University, here in Waltham, for a time, and was associated with the Center for Grieving Children & Teenagers, in Arlington, for a number of years. I have been publishing with Knopf since 2001.” Wright's
Walking to Martha's Vineyard
won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.
Kindertotenwald,
a book of prose poems, appeared in September 2011. Two new collections are in the works.

Of “The Lesson,” Wright notes: “All I can say about my prose poem is that it is based on a true story, the terribly painful life of an eighth-grade friend of mine in Walnut Creek, California. She was a tough girl and she made it, God knows how. She told me about this event only years later, and I have not retained all the details. We're still friends.”

D
AVID
Y
EZZI
was born in Albany, New York, in 1966. His books of poems are
The Hidden Model
(TriQuarterly Books, 2003) and
Azores
(Swallow Press, 2008). He is the editor of
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
(2009). A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, he is executive editor of
The New Criterion,
and he teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Western State College of Colorado. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah, and their three children.

Of “Minding Rites,” Yezzi writes: “The rabbi in the poem is based
on my friend Phil Miller, with whom I used to work. On Fridays, a few of us would gather in Phil's office to read and discuss passages from the Bible, always an enlivening hour given his perception and warmth. Phil is a model family man, who dotes on his wife and children. The anecdote about the flowers is basically true, though the breakup at the end is more a weighing of the possibility. The poem, like an anxious talisman, keeps me mindful of my failings and is a reminder that poems are not flowers—which is to say, I need to make a stop on my way home.”

D
EAN
Y
OUNG
was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, where he holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry. His most recent book is
Fall Higher,
published by Copper Canyon Press in 2011. His selected poems,
Bender,
will be published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.

Of “Restoration Ode,” Young writes: “A lot of poets sometimes feel their poems have clairvoyant moments and can predict the course of events. No matter what Auden says, I believe poems can make things happen. In ‘Restoration Ode' I set out to make something happen through a kind of spell. But as with all hocus-pocus, what happens doesn't usually happen in the way you'd think.”